All You Can Ever Know

Nicole Chung's All YouCan Ever Know is a memoir of her experiences as a transracial adoptee and her development of a mature understanding of herself and of her adoptive and birth families.

Chung had loving adoptive parents who never discussed race with her, because they believed that was the right thing to do. As she grew older, the love and loyalty she felt for her parents coexisted with new realizations of what she had missed. Her childhood fantasies of her biological family were mingled with her sense of abandonment, and the fear that they had given her away because she wasn't good enough. When she became pregnant for the first time, she collected what fragments of information she had, and set out to contact them.

Chung creates a suspenseful story with her avalanches of questions and unexpected discoveries, and her hard-won insights into the nature of identity. She has many thoughts about adoption, but this is also an emotional and level-headed book about the rewards of questioning family expectations in order to come to terms with the complicated truth. --Sara Catterall